


From Dust

by dragonartist5



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Backstory One-Shots, Character Death, Fix-It, Grief, Hurt/Comfort, Missing Years, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Pre-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Slow Burn, Sorry Not Sorry, infinity war destroyed me, updates are sporadic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-25
Updated: 2018-05-25
Packaged: 2019-05-13 13:40:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14749920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonartist5/pseuds/dragonartist5
Summary: "The world’s population, halved. Families torn apart. Friends, companions, colleagues—-gone. Steve struggles to comprehend the enormity of it. Their loss. Earth’s mightiest heroes, reduced to dust."





	From Dust

The Hollow Men 

**_Nat_ **

 

The room is deathly silent. The deafening absence of so many—colleagues, friends—presses in on the seven people sitting in the circular throne room of T’Challa’s palace, suffocating them, tearing at them with sharp teeth.

Nat sits in an ornate, straight-backed chair, elbows on her knees, hands clasped tightly together. Thor paces up and down the length of the room, silent and brooding, every muscle in his body strung-out and tense. Okoye stands in the corner, beside another woman, another of T’challa’s Dora Milaje—face taut, lips pressed in a thin line.  Rocket sits in the chair opposite her, staring at the floor, motionless if it weren’t for the occasional twitch of his whiskers.

The silence is punctuated only by Bruce’s stifled, gasping breaths. He’s attempting to conceal his tears, but the overbright shine in his eyes isn’t lost on Nat. Tears have cut traces in the blood and grime on his face. Nat considers going to him, offering some comfort, and decides against it. There’s distance between them, now. Coldness. It’s almost tangible, offensive in its intensity. So, she maintains the three-foot space between them and attempts to tune him out.

Steve slipped away some time ago, pale and shell-shocked. Nat let him go, knowing she should follow him, but something kept her here, staring unseeingly at the door through which he disappeared.

She’s numb. Her thoughts moves sluggishly, like a creature awakening from a long sleep. Several medics—Shuri’s team—rushed to their aid the minute they emerged from the treeline outside the palace, but Nat brushed them off. She couldn’t allow herself to rest, not yet.

Now, sitting in the throne room, silence pressing in from all sides, she’s aware she can’t feel her toes. There’s a gash running from temple to the curve of her jaw. It’s shallow, no longer bleeding. But it stings.  There’s a terrible, throbbing ache in her side, and it’s hard to draw a breath. Nat suspects a fractured rib, maybe two. Yet, all this dulls in comparison to the shockwaves rolling through her body, wreaking havoc. The warning lights, flashing red.

She’d grown accustomed to loss. She never allowed herself to get too close, to feel too much. Knowing, the same way she recognizes the inevitability of her own death, that the people she loves, the people she cares about, will one day disappear from her life. People—friends, lovers—come and go like moths congregating at a light in the darkness. Here one moment, gone the next. Always, with a flicker. She thought she’d grown accustomed to loss, even expected it, but nothing in the world could’ve prepared her for this.

Even now, listening to Bruce failing to silence his hysteria, she struggles to make sense of it. She glances around, wildly, expecting to find the battle-marked faces of the rest of the team peering back at her. And, realizing, again,  the absence of those faces, clutches the arm of her chair as her world careens out of control. Her brain struggles to connect the dots, to supply a sufficient rhyme or reason for their nonexistence. There is none. They’re just gone. With that cold, overwhelming fact, the image of a monster surfaces at the forefront of her conscious. The enemy.

Thanos.

As this hostile information travels through the billions of neurons in Natasha Romanoff’s brain, her lungs and heart work furiously to supply oxygen to her blood and body. She takes a breath, two, and promptly vomits all over the floor.  

“Natasha!” Bruce yelps, scrambling out of her chair. He sinks to his knees at her side. She brushes him off, heaving, upending the contents of her stomach onto the intricate, vibranium-inlaid tiles. She slumps back, eyes fluttering. Bruce’s chalky-white, concerned face swims in and out of focus. The pain in her ribs burns like fire, prompting another, violent wave of nausea. Bruce places a hand on the small of her back, brushing a lock of sweat-dampened hair away from her face.

“You okay?” He asks, softly.

“I’m fine.” She snaps, drawing away. Part of her doesn’t want him to stop. She wants to tell him the truth. That she craves his touch. That she spent the last two years making herself sick, sleepless and worried, monitoring radio broadcasts and news feeds—anything that gave her the slightest bit of information on his whereabouts. Anything that might help her bring him home. She wants to tell him she loves him, in the wake of all this death and destruction. Attempt to put into words what she could never bring herself to say, before. That if she’d disintegrated into a pile of ashes, she would’ve been alright. Alright, because the last thing she saw would’ve been his face.

Another part of her can’t forgive him, for his radio silence. For his disappearance. That other, ugly, black part of her can’t trust him. That part of her is afraid. Afraid that he’s another moth, that he’ll flicker and die, one day, and leave her alone on this wretched, bleeding Earth. She can’t forgive him.

“You’re not fine.” Bruce says, softly, and reaches for her hand. Nat stands, clutching her side, grimacing.

“I just . . . I need . . .” She mumbles, glancing around. “I’m sorry.” She turns, wrenches open the door, and steps out into the hallway. She finds another, large set of double doors and pulls them open, stepping into the dying light.

The sun’s beginning its descent, casting soft pools of golden light over the treetops. Plumes of smoke billow from rom the battlefield and the jungle, beyond. Huge gauges tear into the earth. The soil is scattered with broken bits of machinery, and bodies. The bodies of Wakandan soldiers, of Titan’s minions, felled in the attack.

She pinches the bridge of her nose, and closes her eyes against the carnage. She stumbles down the steps, feeling panicky and out of breath. She ventures out into the trees, pace quick and footsteps unsteady as she runs.

Her fingers scrape along the bark of a tree and she leans against the trunk, attempting to steady her breathing, teeth scraping along the inside of her cheek. A hard knot forms in her throat, and heat burns in the backs of her eyes. Large, stinging tears spill over her lashes and stain her cheeks. She sinks to her knees, back pressed against the tree. She draws her arms around her body, sealing her lips together, tightly, as the tears come thicker and faster and it’s harder to control the ugly, animal sounds escaping her mouth.

She can’t stop it. Her friends are dead. The world lies in ruins. They lost.

She has every right to cry.

As darkness falls, Nat’s sobs quiet. Someone appears at her side, in the twilight. She squints, and it’s Rhodey. His face is haunted, his eyes red. He holds out his hand, and Nat takes it, climbing to her feet. He leads her back, toward the palace, through the night. Through the silence and the ghosts and the growing shadows.

 

**_Steve_ **

 

Steve wanders the halls of the palace blindly, hands clenched and balled into fists at his sides. He doesn’t know where he’s going, only that he has to get out, get away, get _somewhere._ He screws up his eyes, as if against a bright light, opening doors at random, letting his feet carry him through the corridors and cavernous, ornate rooms. All the while, a scream builds in his throat.

He can hear his heart, beating in his chest, the rushing blood in his ears. He pauses, clutching the wall for support. A sharp, agonizing pain shoots through his body. Steve claps a hand to his chest, gasping. For a moment, he thinks he might be having a heart attack. He sways, certain he’s going to double over and faint dead away in a matter of seconds. Then, the moment passes, and the pain in his chest dims to a dull ache. Steve exhales, continuing on, pace quickening.

In the end, he winds up in a small, modestly decorated room on the East Wing of the palace. It’s a bedroom, empty and unused. A gargantuan, four-poster bed stands along the centers of the back wall. A tapestry, with cords of color—deep violet, orange, blue—angs adjacent to the bed.

Steve sways, vision tunneling, and a voice whispers inside his head.

_Steve . . ._

Bucky.

Steve took a single, shuddering step toward his friend, but Buck had already disintegrating, slipping like a handful of sand through his fingers. If he’d gotten there, if he’d done something, anything . . .

 _No._ A voice in his head scolds, warningly. _You couldn’t._

Steve’s hand strikes a fragile, crystal vase on the dressing table. It flies across the room and shatters against the wall, glass shards flying in every direction.

The dam breaks, in Steve’s chest. He screams, sinking to his hands and knees upon the floor. The sound that escapes him is violent, a wordless expression of anger and desperation and guilt and fear. It hurts, on its way out, scourging his lungs and his throat. He beats his fist on the floor, choking, sobbing.

Steve sees their faces, floating in his line of vision. Their eyes, rolled skyward. Their bodies, breaking apart. The realization, etched upon their terrified faces, as they glanced down and found parts of themselves disappearing before their eyes.  

Steve’s mind reels.

The world’s population, halved. Families torn apart. Friends, companions, colleagues—-gone. He struggles to comprehend the enormity of it. Their loss.

Earth’s mightiest heroes, reduced to dust.

 

***

 

Steve’s sobs don’t subside for a long time. When he cries himself out, he’s empty and broken but cleansed, somehow. He emerges, the tears still drying on his face.

He finds the others in the throne room. The door creaks, and they look up, quickly, shaken from reveries. Shaken from the quiet, lonely business of mourning. Their eyes find him, bore into him. The question is unspoken, but Steve hears it.

_What now?_

He’s the leader. The one they look to, for answers. He can see it in their faces. The tentative hope, lighted there. The hope that he, Steve Rogers, their captain, will find a way to pull them out of this. To fix it. To lead them to victory. To avenge their friends.

But Steve doesn’t have an answer, for them. He can’t fix this.

He shakes his head, almost imperceptibly, avoiding their eyes, knowing he should say something, offer them some words of comfort.

“Where’s Nat?” Is all he can muster, and he finds that she, of all people, is the only one he can stand to look in the eye. His voice is roughened and hoarse from crying. He must look like hell.

Rhodes gestures down the hall.

“Second door on the left.”

Steve pauses outside the door, hand resting on the knob. He turns it, and steps inside. Nat’s sitting in an armchair, hands clasped on her lap. Her hair is a tangled mess of grimy, bleach-blond hair. Her face is bloodied, swollen and bruised in places. Her gaze is unfocused, and for a moment, she stares straight through him.

“Nat.” Steve breathes. He crosses the room, going to her side, and sinks in the empty chair opposite her. She turns, then, and he knows his voice has reached her through the stupor of shock and grief.

“Steve.” She says, and she sounds just as bad as Steve feels. Her voice flickers and dies on the last syllable, and she swallows.

Steve tries to ask her if she’s alright, if she’s holding up, but it feels silly and pointless and empty. She’s not okay. Nobody is.

Again, the memory of Bucky’s fragmented body, slipping away, surfaces in the forefront of his consciousness. He pushes the thought away, gritting his teeth.

He looks at her, fresh tears glistening in his eyes.

She’s always been the strongest of them. Tough, in body and in spirit. Always ready for a fight. She’s rough around the edges. Steve’s known her for years, and yet, he doesn’t know her. Not really. She’s got impenetrable walls, a fortress. Her past, shadowed and twisted, remains a mystery.

Seeing her like this, weepy and disoriented, scares him.

“Nat . . .” Steve begins. She grabs his hand, squeezes it, stopping his words with a shake of her head.

They sit like that for a long time, hands clasped, staring into the depths of the shattered world they must face. Not moving,  not talking, each absorbed in their own grief, afraid to disturb the other.

After a while, Nat meets his eyes, cheeks glistening.

“What are we going to do, Steve?” She asks, hollowly. Steve swallows, glancing at her hands—calloused and battle-scarred, her nails—ragged and bitten-off.

“I don’t know, Nat.” Steve says. “I don’t know.”

 

**_Tony_ **

 

Tony’s fist slams into the slab of rock beneath him, this cracked, crumbling planet.

_Oh, god._

Three of his knuckles split down the seam. The wounds are clean. The sting shocks him into the present. This, at least, makes sense. Blood trickles out of the cuts and pool in the folds of skin along his hands, his palms. A drop of blood traces the curve of his wrist. Tony wets the his chapped, bleeding lips with his tongue and closes his eyes against the heat of tears, burning at the backs of his eyes.

He thinks of the kid’s body, disintegrating beath his fingers before he fully registered what was going on. By then, it was too late.

Tony’s breathe lodges in his throat, and a scream tears through his lungs, sinking in the silence that stretches for lightyears, eons. His ears are ringing. An effect of his wounds, perhaps, or the universe’s swan song.  
He’s falling. The ground pitches and rolls under his feet as he struggles to stand, then crumbles to his knees, again. Tony hears himself screaming, but it’s distant. Watered-down and distorted, punctuated by the damned ringing, and the deafening silence that’s spreading throughout the galaxy. A tide, rippling across the stars. It’s dragging his head under the surface. Tony thrashes, fighting it, but the darkness is closing in, and he’s not sure he can beat it.  
“Kid,” He moans, trembling, unable to pull the pieces together. Parker’s gone. There’s nothing left—no blood, no body.  
He glances around, helpless and bewildered, blind with tears. He finds himself wishing for a body, for something, anything, to hold onto, as his world careens out of control.  
There’s nothing. Nothing. But the silence and the dust and the groaning, sun-warmed scrap metal littering the surface of Titan. For the first time, Tony realizes the enormity of it.

He lost. They lost. All of them. There’s no fixing this. There’s no saving the world. Not this time.  
He’s not a hero. He’s a murderer.  
Because the Parker’s dead.  
_It’s my fault,_ Tony thinks. _I was stupid enough to drag a kid into this mess._

He’d been the one to build the kid a suit, to christen him into the Avengers, to let him die, without lifting a finger. And the blood is on his hands.  
Blood rushes in his ears, accompanying the bothersome ringing that refuses to diminish. His body aches with every breath, and black spots swim before his eyes. The tattered remains of his suit cling tight to his body, sealed with sweat and grime and congealed blood. He presses a hand to his abdomen, where the purple bastard stabbed him, and his hand comes away scarlet and dripping. He should be dead. If it weren’t for Strange, he would be. God, Strange. Dead, too. Gone.  
_There was no other way._  
“Damnit.” Tony groans, through gritted teeth. He failed them. All of them.  
He knew it would end this way, hadn’t he? Hadn’t he seen it?  
Tony draws a sharp breath, and a fresh and biting wave of agony blossoms from his wound and spreads throughout his body, awakening an entire symphony of aches and pains. Bruises on his ribs, a cut above his eye, a fractures wrist, a bleeding gash in his thigh, a buried piece of shrapnel. All of them, dull in comparison to the black void in his chest.

The kid’s dead.

Another scream crawls up his windpipe, and he bites it back, tears spilling onto his grimy, stubble-lined cheek, cutting tracks in the dirt and blood layering his skin.

 _He’ll never celebrate his eighteenth birthday._ Tony doubles over, the thought equivalent to a sucker-punch in the gut.

His fault. All his fault. His fault. His fault.

_My fault._

He’ll never experience adulthood, he’ll never marry, never hold a child in his arms. He’ll never grow old and gray. The voice in his head is screaming, shrilly.

Taken, too early.

It’s too much, for Tony. He slumps forward, gasping and dizzy, imagining all the scenarios in his head. Facing May, watching the light leave her eyes as he tells her.

_I killed your nephew. It’s my fault he’s dead. I’m sorry._

She won’t have a body to bury.

The sound of groaning, creaking metal jolts Tony into the present. He turns, looking blearily at the purple robot-woman. The only other living soul on Titan, with him. He watches, perplexed and a little nauseated, as her shoulder, her hip, three of her fingers, rotate and pop back into place. She blinks, and one of her eyes rolls in its socket, before falling still and focusing on him.

“We need to get off this planet.” She says.

Tony shrugs.

“Look around, Sweetheart.” He says, roughly. “We don’t have a ship. The flying donut’s non-operational at the moment.”

The woman rolls her eyes.

“I’ve got a ship. And I’m going after Thanos.”

Tony struggles to his feet, still clutching at the wound in his abdomen.

“Uh, I don’t think so.”

The woman’s face pinches into a grimace, and she bares her teeth.

“If you want to get off this rock, you’re coming with me. If you don’t, you’ll die.” Without another word, the woman marches off. Tony stumbles after her. His wound, and the tattered metal remains of his suit, still cling to his body, hinder his pace. He attempts to peel the suit away, but a bolt of pain tears through his torso, and he inhales, gritting his teeth.

“Wait!” He yells. The woman pauses, turns.

“You want to kill Thanos, yes?”

The woman nods, slowly.

“It’s my life’s mission, to hunt him and kill him. I will tear him apart.” She pauses. “I will kill him slowly, painfully. I will make him pay for the things he’s done.”

Tony sniffs, wiping the tears from his cheeks.

“Okay . . . so, I think we’re on the same page. I want to kill Thanos. You want to kill Thanos. I can help you, but you gotta work with me.”

“I don’t need your help.” The woman spits, viciously.

“Oh, for god’s sake . . .” Tony hisses. He takes a hand away from his wound, showing her the deep, dark wetness staining his sweatshirt, beneath the metal fragments of his suit. The bleeding is getting worse.

“I need your help.” Tony says, cursing the way his voice trembles and breaks on the last word. “I need to get back to Earth.” For the first time, he thinks of Pepper, wonders if she’s alive.

_Oh, god._

A wave of fear and guilt washes over him so, and he nearly doubles over, unable to breathe.

Pepper . . .

The woman-robot’s eyes move as separate entities—one trained on his face, the other inspecting the wound in his abdomen.

Her chin twitches, and she relents.

“This way, follow me.”

She leads him to the ship, and he half limps, half hops behind her. He grips the rail with one, white-knuckles hand and drags himself into the craft, which looks like a dark, steely gray dragon’s egg (or what he imagines one would look like, anyway).

The door seals, and the woman climbs into the pilot’s seat, pushing buttons and tapping commands into the console.

“I’m Tony.” He yells, as the engine roars to life. The woman shrugs, ignoring him. Tony laughs, to himself, and the sound is hollow.

“Nice to meet you, too.”

  
**_Rocket_ **

 

Darkness has fallen over Wakanda. The others split off, eventually. One by one, they rise from their chairs, hollow men, escorted to rooms within the palace or given medical attention. All except Rocket. He sits in the throne room, toes dangling a solid four inches above the ground. He taps a claw along the barrel of his gun, which he clutches to his chest. His thoughts are quiet, and his heart aches. He doesn’t know what happened to the rest of his friends—his family. He doesn’t know if they’re dead or alive, only that he’s alone, stuck on this battered, bleeding planet.

A Wakandan, one of T’Challa’s Dora Milaje, stands by the door, watching him with a smear of puzzlement and disgust written in the lines of her face.

“What’re you lookin’ at?” He snaps.

“I’ve never seen a talking rat.” The soldier replies, idly. Rocket’s lip curls, ears flattening to his head.

“I’m not a rat.” He snaps. “Watch it, or I’ll rip off your fingers and shove them up your ass.”

The soldier blinks, and her grasp tightens around the spear, eyes narrowing. Rocket scoffs, leaping nimbly from the chair.

His room is on the third floor of the palace, away from the others. They are family, a brotherhood. He is alone.

Rocket steps onto the balcony, turning his snout toward the inky black sky stretching above Wakanda. He gazes at the silver dusting of stars. A deep, aching _something_ tugs at his poor little raccoon’s heart. He thinks of Groot, of the single, puzzled cry that left him before he turned to dust, to nothing.

_Dad._

Dad.

Rocket runs his paws over his eyes, trying to rid himself of the memory. But it stays. It stays like a second shadow,breaking into his thoughts, renewing his grief and panic—a wound he keeps reopening.

The night is silent and dark and empty. Wakanda is grieving. The world is holding its breath.

 


End file.
